Back-To-School

Back-to-school. It is a phrase that will never lose its charm or intrigue, three words that conjure up for me the smell of construction paper in primary colors, the feel against my skin of pleated plaid skirts and cotton blouses with Peter Pan collars, the syncopated slamming of 500 lockers all at once. It has been 48 years since my last back-to-school August and I can still feel the weight of books on my hip.

One day last week something (I wish I knew what.) made me think of the traditional, classic, very much not-a-Trapper-Keeper three-ring binder that was the foundation of my school supply wardrobe. Wrapped in thick blue canvas, it would, by the end of the year, be faded and festooned with my personal graffiti, its corners buffed and scuffed into short tassels.

I remember making an occasion of removing the plastic from the 300-sheet pack of blue-lined notebook paper and tapping the stack on its bottom edge to perfectly align the holes before easing them gently onto the binder rings, also known as the jaws of death. I remember anguishing over how to organize the dividers: alphabetically? by period? Should I separate each of the sheets of graph paper from the gummy adhesive at the top of the tablet before placing them behind the divider carefully labeled “Geometry”? Was I going to need those fold-out world maps when this year’s social studies offering was American History? And what of the pencil case, rarely used for pencils, but rather as the sacred receptacle for my collection of Blue Horse redemption points?

On those late summer evenings with all my treasures spread out around me on the yellow linoleum kitchen table, the voices of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley rumbling from the console television in the den, drowned out occasionally by the sound of a chicken leg falling into hot grease or a baseball hitting the side of the house, I was as happy as I would ever be.

And I didn’t know it.

Children never do. Even the ones with learner’s permits in their wallets and the new football season’s schedule memorized. Even the ones who, in a matter of two brief years, will be checking the mailbox for letters from college admissions offices and imagining what it will be like to not have a curfew. Especially the ones whose unrecognized happiness is built on the security of home and the expansiveness of community.

I, like everyone else I know, have muttered more than once over the last few weeks about the increase in traffic and the crowded check-out lines, but I have also paused in more than one aisle to stare at blunt-tip scissors and boxes of crayons, listened for the first school bus’s guttural herald, and suddenly felt myself jonesing for a new pair of tennis shoes. I have found myself mesmerized by the realization that there was a time – years and years of my life – when my only responsibility was to learn, my only job on any given morning was to march out into the world and discover something new. It is a sensation as overwhelming in its own way as holding a baby for the first time or watching a solar eclipse.

Back-to-school. Right, left. Back-to-school. Right, left. The kindergartners with Disney Princess backpacks dangling dangerously low to the ground. The skinny teenagers who ask to be dropped off at the corner. The brand-new college students who may scream at the next person who asks, “What’s your major?” They chant the cadence, march into the fray, and engage the battle against ignorance which is, they will eventually learn, the most difficult, the most crucial, the most worthy battle of all.

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